


A Color Archaic

by jessgofffff



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Destiny, Destiny 2, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 07:12:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12316272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessgofffff/pseuds/jessgofffff
Summary: Aren awakens and finds himself in a world completely different than he knew, but somehow the same- conflict, danger, and a seemingly insurmountable obstacle stain the present and cloud the future. He struggles to find his place on the changed Earth, all the while trying to reconnect the scattered dots of his hazy memory. Soon old connections he never knew he had will find him, and new alliances he forms will inspire a journey across the Sol system in pursuit of one vital goal: Unity.





	1. Vena Cava

His eyes shot open like he’d awoken from a nightmare, but his heart beat slow and rhythmic in its steadiness. A nostalgic pattern, an old song for which he couldn’t remember the lyrics. He looked up and out at the landscape around. A chill breeze brushed his skin, tingling as it passed and continued over the troughs and ridges of the valley towards the steep stone rising high above the floor, kicking sparse dry flurries of snow with it. High clouds streaked the upper atmosphere, thin and warm translucent gold against the sky stained deep red, like dark wine or something else he knew but couldn’t place.

Rust coated a panel of metal that lay bent beside his body.

Iron.

He inhaled and his chest burned white hot like he was breathing liquid steel. He coughed and heaved, trying to push it out, all of it. His tongue remembered the bitter tinge and he prayed for water, his hand desperately shoveling a fistfull of dirty snow into his mouth, his lips stinging with the cold, his mouth numb as it melted and he swallowed harshly. His breathing steadied.

The wall rose above him a few hundred meters away and he knew he was outside: a view this long couldn’t exist in the city. He saw the huge door and the faded “017” printed above it and remembered exactly where he was and why.

He was on the burial ground.

He remembered the plague, the camp in dirty shambles as they tried their best to stave it off, to wipe it out; how they watched as it did exactly that to _them_. He remembered losing so many before falling to it himself, unable to get up from his mat. And that was it, where it stopped. The empty cold of the stone ground was the last thing he felt before nothingness.

It had taken him. He’d died, and he was left here like so many others who fell to the same fate.

He was sure, he could feel it, so why were his eyes open? Was this the afterlife that some of the ancient religions mentioned? Would he be here, wandering the land for eternity? No. He bent his fingers in sequence and squeezed them into a tight fist, the tendons and muscles stiff from the cold. Somehow he knew he was alive, real. He moved to stand, crouching on one knee and pushing up, when a mechanical whir and a sequence of blips sounded behind him and he turned to face whatever made it.

A small geometric shape floated in front of him, a cube with flattened corners and concave faces, a sphere with glowing markings at the very center. It moved to hover closer to his face, and he craned his head back in avoidance, staring intently as he realised what it was.

A Ghost. That meant that he _was_ dead, but for how long? And since a ghost had revived him from his sleep with Light, he knew he was a chosen by the Traveler. He was a Guardian.

“I almost gave up, you know.” The voice came from within the central sphere of the Ghost.

He blinked, unable to voice his thoughts, if he could even sort them out in the first place.

“I tried waking you, but you didn’t respond. It was like you were lost in there somewhere, or gone forever.” The Ghost panned around to get a more complete view of his body. “But I came back when I heard you coughing.”

He recalled the searing pain he felt earlier, but now he remembered it like it was long ago, in some distant past, and he took a deep breath, his lungs clear and strong.

“I had an infection.” He said flatly. “A lot of people died from it. Myself included, I guess.”

The Ghost relaxed its eye, its sides pushing out from its center a bit, staring intently at him for a second before coming together again and turning away. It said nothing, and he wasn’t sure what that meant, but he ignored it.

He looked out to the horizon, the mountains rising high and white in the distance. They were silent for a long moment as they both watched the last of the sunset fade behind the curved Earth, until the Ghost looked back at him.

“We should probably get you inside. It’s not the safest out here these days.”

He nodded and started walking towards the wall.

* * *

 “My parents were human. I was adopted very young.” He stood straight and still, facing the front door of a small apartment on the ground floor of the block. All drab concrete, stained dark with age, dull under the cloudy late autumn sky. The only sign of active life existing there was a smattering of brightly colored banners hanging between balconies and above windows, swaying loosely in the wind. They were all plain, no patterns or decoration. “They gave me my name, Aren. I didn’t have one before, or not one they knew.” He stepped slowly towards the door, raising his hand to the knob and gripping it for a second before letting go.

“There’s a chance they could still be alive, you know.” The Ghost said, its voice low and hesitant in consideration. It floated between Aren and the door, looking between the two.

Aren grinned, a small quick warp of his until-now flat expression. He turned away from the building and began walking down the narrow street in short strides.

“They never liked red.”

The Ghost looked back at the door, where a sunset-red cloth was gathered and pinned before it stretched towards the underside of the balcony above. It spun once before turning back to follow its Guardian before he could get too far away.

They moved past more apartments like the last, block after block of black-streaked cement slab walls with bright pops of color, banners or flags, all cloth. Here and there they passed a wheeled stand where someone was selling homemade food, or jewelry, or more of the same cloths that littered the walls and hung overhead across the small road.

“A lot of people never see this part of the City.” Aren’s voice cut over the dull but constant sound of wooden wheels turning against gravel and dusty footprints crunching past. “They think it’s all pretty. Everything clean, everyone healthy, all plenty and light.” His Ghost looked up at him curiously, listening as intently as it could while also avoiding posts and pillars. “Not so much out here.”

He nodded towards a clearing between buildings they could see at the end of a short alley between tall grey walls.

“Especially back when I was alive. We were accepting more refugees than ever, and even then resources were scarce. We didn’t have enough food to fill everyone, lots of families shared a single apartment. We made almost everything ourselves: clothes, tools, the small amount of furniture we had. It was hard on everyone.”

He stopped to browse one of the cloth stands, fingering through long folded strips laid out parallel in no real order, the colors a bright assortment of oranges and blues, yellows and pinks. He pulled a pale pink one and held it up in the cloud-filtered light. He removed the small white cloth that hung tied around his neck, the one his Ghost had given him when he was revived, and handed it to the man at the stand. He was elderly, his skin dark tan and wrinkled, his hair gathered in a wiry white braid at the back of his neck. He accepted the cloth with gratitude and bowed his head gently, but low, to Aren. Aren returned the bow, holding the pink cloth in both hands.

He tied the new cloth around his neck like a scarf, letting the excess hang behind his back. He noticed his Ghost’s curious stare at the cloth as they continued walking deeper into the City.

“They represent the colors of the sky.” He smiled warmly, feeling a faded memory pull at the center of his chest. “Not many people from the city see the outside. Even the ones who live this close to the wall might only step outside it a few times in their lives, if at all. We don’t see much of the Earth.” He looked up, between the cracks where the walls gave way to the street, to the grey-blue clouds. “But one thing we always have is the sky. The sun rises and falls, storms come and sunny days follow. We find some amount of happiness there, calmness and peace. So we dye these cloths like the colors we see above us, as a reminder. And we keep them around.”

The Ghost whirred and blinked as they turned a corner. In the near distance was a clearing bustling with people and flying vehicles landing and taking off.

“What’s this?” Aren asked, his eyes perked with interest as he was pulled back to the present.

“They set up many of these ports. They move Guardians around, taking them between different areas within and outside the City.” The Ghost turned quickly to face Aren, floating close to his face.

“This is how we’re getting to the Tower.”


	2. Hoarfrost

Moonlight spread soft in its glow across the water, dappled its navy surface with silver radiance. Altocumulus clouds shone like they were backlit against the deep night sky, casting the land with surreal chiaroscuro. They painted the rough hills with contrast, adorned the hulls of forgotten ships long past longing for captains with new livery rivaling anything a mortal artist could create with her hands. Life before inspiration, nature’s Rembrandt.

Track. Hold. Squeeze. Jerk.

Drop.

Another Dreg felled from 800 meters, high on a crest.

Aren lay like that, belly-down on the cold concrete roof of a square one-room building that stood there still, after centuries of disuse. Snow fell in paper-thin layers of powder, carried into tiny drifts piled on the eaves and corners by thin wind, and he sniped. Nightly this was his ritual, his action-mantra. During the day he wandered: clearing fallen- and hive-infested buildings, gathering what resources he needed, taking in the raw, silent beauty of the old coastal moorland. But at night until he slept, if he slept at all, he focused his sight on faraway enemies and killed them, swift and unseen, leaving no evidence but the loud tear that ripped through the atmosphere and echoed into silence as quickly as it was born.

He’d stopped making fires weeks ago. The cold, he thought, became him. Warmth had a place in the world, but it wasn’t with him. Not anymore.

* * *

Ghost turned and spun excitedly.

“Let’s get moving!” It floated towards the busy port, filled with Guardians and workers handling caches of supplies ready to stock the shops and armories of the Tower. Groups of humans and frames worked at moving and stacking crates and boxes into the holds of generic grey ships, some silent in their work but most exchanging flashed smiles, whistling, catching up with their coworkers about their nights. Sharing their lives casually, just another day in the City.

The static excitement that filled his chest and sparked in his stomach quickly turned against him. It pulled at his insides and twisted them, clamped them tight like a vice, and his enlivened lightheadedness turned to spinning vertigo. He crouched to steady himself and his nerves, to try to regain the composure he’d kept. His Ghost had turned around by then, and it approached him slowly, swooping around in quiet arcs to get all angles of him.

“You alright?”

Aren didn’t recognize the voice, it wasn’t his Ghost. He looked up, shielding his swollen pupils from the bright overcast sky with his hand. He couldn’t make out her face perfectly, but he noticed she was like him. Her skin was blue, but darker and warmer than his, and her eyes shone cool white. Her chest and shoulders were bulky with heavy armor, and she had a massive machine gun slung across her back. She stood relaxed but with motion still in her, like she stopped suddenly and had no intent of staying still for long.

“I think so.” His voice was low and sluggish against his will. He let his hand fall so she could better see his face. “Thanks.”

She looked down at him for a second before skipping back into motion, her voice trailing over her shoulder.

“Okay, hunter.”

After a moment of silent thought his Ghost floated close to his head, its voice quiet and short.

“What’s wrong, Aren?”

Aren pushed himself up stiffly, glancing again at the port. He caught the back of the one who’d just talked to him as she was getting into the side of a ship lined with other Guardians on route to their base. The long blue ship lifted off lithely from the ground and floated straight up before pushing off towards the Tower that was its destination.

“I don’t think I can handle this.” He looked down to his hands, his palms turned up and fingers spread before he balled his left into a tight fist. “Not yet.”

His Ghost spun, its eye narrowed with concern, as Aren turned and walked back towards the outskirts of the City from where they’d come. It turned and watched as another transport carried a full load of Guardians off to their assignments, whatever they were. It stared as they lifted up and away before turning back to its own Guardian and following him away towards the wall.

“Where are you going?”

But the Ghost got no answer. Aren walked on, head downturned, staring at the rocks he kicked as he walked along the dusty back street.

“Aren, what’s-”

“Don’t.” He interrupted, his voice distant and harsh as it reached his Ghost from the gravel below. “I just,” he looked ahead at the wall they faced once again, and up at the rosy dusk that settled in the sky above its brim, “need some time. Alone.”

  
  
  



End file.
